Searching for Gavrilo Princip

Eighty-six years ago the Serbian teenager shot an Archduke and set Europe on the road to World War I. Today he is all but forgotten

I had arrived in Bosnia knowing little about Sarajevo except that
it had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics and had withstood a
devastating 1992-95 siege involving Bosnian Serb besiegers and
Bosnian Muslim defenders. After excruciating negotiations, Bosnia
and Herzegovina had been created out of part of what had been
multiethnic Yugoslavia, with now mainly Muslim Sarajevo as its
principal city.

I also knew that these ethnic passions were nothing new in the
Balkans. Sarajevo was the place where, on June 28, 1914, a
19-year-old Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip shot Austrian
archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The
assassination was one of the defining events of the 20th century,
touching off World War I. By the end of 1918, more than a
generation of Europe's best lay dead in the trenches.

But who was Gavrilo Princip? I soon realized that although he
was a national hero prior to Yugoslavia's early 1990s
disintegration into warring factions, he was now considered a
criminal terrorist by Bosnia. Even finding the site of the
assassination was difficult. But was it possible that the history
of Gavrilo Princip and the event that sparked World War I was not
lost or destroyed but merely hidden away? In the summer of 1992
when Serb snipers and artillery began pounding Sarajevo, citizens
attacked symbols of the former Yugoslavia. First on their list was
the old Gavrilo Princip museum. The bulk of the collection was
saved, I was told, by a courageous curator named Bajro Gec. But
where was Gec? "Try the Jewish Museum," I was advised. "You may
find him there."

Inside
the shuttered museum, Bajro Gec escorted me down to the basement,
where two large wooden trunks sat beneath barred windows. He slowly
lifted one of the lids as the hinges shrieked in protest. "Here are
the clothes Princip wore when he was arrested," said Gec, holding
up a black wool suit with tarnished metal buttons.

Since Princip was 19 at the time of the assassination, he could
not be hanged under Austrian law. He died of tuberculosis after
only four years of a 20-year sentence.

No longer are bridges, army barracks and elementary schools
named after Gavrilo Princip. But his memory still is revered by
Petar Princip, 61, the family's last direct descendant in
Bosnia.

Says Petar, "I'm proud to be a Princip, but I'm also sad to be
part of a forgotten history."

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